The life lessons of Burning Man / Is there anything you *can't* learn from the insane desert art festival?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Published
4:00 am PDT, Friday, August 28, 2009

As I've been lured back to the sweltering, dusty sexed-up madness that is Burning Man again this year -- my sixth time -- by a gaggle of delicious friends, I am hereby reminded of a few hundred truths, half-truths, outright lies and astonishing epiphanies offered up by the world-famous, Christian-feared, beautifully debauched, sensory overloaded, impossible-to-describe art-survivalist-camping-rave megaspectacle now underway in the remote Nevada desert.

If you've ever wondered at the appeal, the urge, the drive to attend such a thing, if you've heard wisps of the mythology and the mystery and the epic weirdness or even seen a few pictures and wondered, you know, WTF, maybe these tidbits can help.

Then again, maybe not. With something like Burning Man, there really is only one way to know for sure.

You are not who you thought you were Countless are the tales and numerous are the personal friends who were once to be found hovering near the far end of the overly anxious, tightly wound, frenetic Type-A personality scale, who attended BM for the first time and wandered out on the playa at sundown and just so happened to stumble upon, say, Serpent Mother, or the giant goddesses, or one of David Best's breathtaking temples or any of a thousand other unearthly spectacles and suddenly felt their skull crack open and their eyes spin around in their sockets and their brain fold back in on itself.

Right there and forevermore, their worldview shifted. Their id swallowed its own tongue. Possibility opened its legs wide and went, ahhh. In short, they lightened the hell up. It's rather astonishing how often this happens, and not just to the uptight and the pushy. This is one of the most powerful aspects of the event: It almost matters not from which angle you approach it -- Burning Man is an equal opportunity soul exploder.

You are not alone In your wild dissatisfaction with how things are. In your frustration with socially and politically imposed limitations. In your conviction that there simply must be more to this tertiary experience than work and traffic and hostility, grind and paunch and slump. In your need to fly your freak flag high, cut more loose than you thought possible, test your limits. In your admiration for boy shorts and leather vests and body paint and oral sex in public places.

In short, BM reminds you that you are far from alone in your understanding that this is one hugely painful, incredibly difficult, unbearably gorgeous, terrifying, excruciatingly short life experience and sometimes the best you can hope for is to dress in fake fur and mount the dragon and scream from atop the roof of a dusty RV of your ravenous desire to lick the moon.

You really might die at any moment You could be crushed under the wheels of a massive rolling pirate ship. You could be impaled on the three-foot metal eyelash of a giant roving eyeball. You could be hit in the chest by a megabolt of man-made lighting shooting off a live Tesla coil. Anything can happen, really. And it usually does.

Yes, I know, you are reminded of your mortality every day living in the cruel, cruel city, the angry buses and lurching taxis and potential H1N1 outbreaks, not to mention the armed Republican psychozealots. But of course, we forget. We get a little numb. BM gives it to you raw and hot and dirty and says, you are not long for this world, you messy little speck of spiritual spacedust. What do you want to do about it?

No one really understands copious genital piercings There's always one, that amazing dude you always see at Burning Man wandering around Center Camp in nothing but a camelback, a camouflage cowboy hat and countless indecipherable tattoos, completely naked and fully resplendent in his stack of bolts running up the penile shaft and a giant Prince Albert through the frenulum and a ladder of rods all the way up underneath, more metal than penis and more magnetically baffling than aesthetically alluring.

No matter how much weirdness you encounter out there, no matter how exhausted your eye becomes from the nonstop visual orgasmica, you cannot help but glance down and go, oh my God, that right there is some deep psychosexual concern, my friend, some painful and fascinating need for self-mutilation and in a weird sort of way I am uniquely privileged to be here right now, standing next to such a wonder as I order a dusty iced coffee just after dancing at sunrise to Bassnectar but just before heading over to Porn & Eggs camp where they serve up copious offerings of both for my morning ablution. This is all I'm saying.

You have not really seen everything Oh how you love to be all jaded and bleak-minded and wary. Oh how you love to think you're all been-there-done-that super-cool hypercynical because you make your own nose rings and smoke five pounds of ganja a day and once had sex with Bon Iver's cousin.

Whatever. Even the most slow-blinking, trendier-than-thou uber-hipster will eventually be confronted by something at this event that will shake her to her core and slap her asunder and make her maybe, hopefully see something new, reminded of the mad, impossible, neverending flux of memory and experience, even if it is merely how utterly inane her uber-hipster facade really is. This is a good thing.

Man, this is the way life should always be It's sort of amazing out there. There is a refreshing lack of general whiny uptightedness. There is almost no fear of sex or inebriant or personal expression (to a fault), no brittle dogma, no two-faced political scandal, no shrill Republican screeching. There is no money changing hands, no economy per se, almost everything is free, including and especially the art, which is everywhere, and copious, and very much like nothing you will see anywhere else on the planet.

To millions, this is a vision of living hell. To millions of others, it is pure heaven, as all those insipid sociocultural masks and veils drop away and all the boundaries blur and genders intermingle and meanings shift and dance and pass out from the heat. You come away saying damn, why can't life be like this all the time?

Oh wait, no it shouldn't Get real. Burning Man is a completely outrageous, multimillion dollar, for-profit, impossibly unsustainable theatrical megaproduction. This is, in part, why we love it. Tickets are $300 and it costs many hundreds if not thousands more in gear, supplies, transport to attend, and while you can get there and do it on a grimy hippie sort of budget if you leech on your friends just right, it's basically a very expensive, meta-bohemian, chemically enhanced anti-vacation. It's all a grand and ridiculous and temporary illusion, not at all meant to be transposed on a livable sphere.

Or is it? You may not be able to take the pseudo-economy and the neo-pagan society back with you, but what you can transpose, of course, is the sense of awe. The fearlessness. The creative wonder. You can bring back confidence. Abandon. Fierce joy. Really, what more could you ask for?

Mark's column appears every Wednesday on SFGate, and is frequently cross-posted to Huffington Post. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list, click here and remove three more.